SETI gets a $100 million boost from philanthropy

Unprecedented in its scope and funding, a new 10-year, $100 million initiative called Breakthrough Listen will tap two of the world’s largest radio telescopes in an effort to reinvigorate the search for extraterrestrial intelligence—also known as SETI.

Between 20% to 25% of the annual observing time of the 100-m Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia and the 64-m CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, will be devoted to listening for messages coming from the center of the Milky Way and from the one million stars and 100 galaxies closest to Earth. According to scientists involved with the initiative, the GBT and the Parkes telescope will outperform radio searches of previous or existing SETI projects because the combined telescopes will be able to cover 10 times more of the sky, scan at least 5 times more of the radio spectrum (from roughly 0.1 GHz to 116 GHz), and perform 100 times faster.

A partnering instrument, the Automated Planet Finder telescope at the California-based Lick Observatory, will be on the lookout for interstellar optical laser transmissions that might be sent by an alien civilization. And the SETI@home network, a distributed computing experiment based at the University of California, Berkeley, and connecting more than 9 million users worldwide, will process the data. A related initiative, Breakthrough Message, will organize a global discussion on how humans should communicate with alien life and will host an open competition, featuring $1 million in prizes, to create the best messages that could be read by an advanced civilization.

Breakthrough Listen is a prime example of philanthropic organizations taking bigger risks than the federal government on fundamental research. It will be underwritten by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, cofounded by Russian billionaire and technology investor Yuri Milner. The foundation hands out prizes—some worth as much as $3 million—to outstanding researchers in fundamental physics, the life sciences, and mathematics. “The search for intelligent life in the universe is the ultimate win–win,” says Milner. “Either we’re unique, or we’ve got company. Either outcome is quite remarkable.”

Speaking at a 20 July press conference, Berkeley astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, one of the scientists on the leadership team, said that research findings from Breakthrough Listen will go through the normal peer-review and journal-publishing process. He is one of several physicists and astronomers to have endorsed an open letter , organized by Milner, that outlines a broad motivation for the initiative. Other signers include Frank Drake, Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Jill Tarter, Steven Weinberg, and Edward Witten. Drake and Rees also serve on the Breakthrough Listen leadership team.

"[The initiative] is great news for the astronomy community,” said Harvard University astronomer Abraham Loeb, one of the letter’s cosigners. Because of federal underfunding for SETI and other astronomical research, “these state-of-the-art telescopes” have been in a “bad situation,” he added. That is particularly true for the GBT, currently under threat of losing all of its NSF funding in 2017. Funding from Breakthrough Listen—$2 million per year for 10 years—may be enough to keep the facility afloat, at least through that period.

Short of discovering alien life in the next 10 years, “we expect to establish clear detection thresholds,” said Marcy. “This is sure to bear fruit,” said Hawking. “If a search of this scale and sophistication finds no evidence of intelligence out there it will be a very interesting result. It will not prove that we are alone, but it will narrow the possibilities. It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark.”